"Put the baby down. Do it now," Sgt. Nick Shephard shouted at a distressed man who appeared on the video screen, holding a baby close to a freeway's ledge. Moments later, "the baby goes over the edge," he said afterward, "and we end up being forced to shoot."

He then adopted a different tactic, speaking gently to the same man as the video rolled again. "Absolutely, I care," he said. "Nothing more I care about right now than you, trust me." The man in the video, an avatar voiced by an actor, sobbed as he put the baby safely on the ground.

The two scenarios played out in a walk-in simulator in Volusia County, in east-central Florida, with video projected onto a curved wall, part of the training new recruits in the sheriff's department go through as they learn to defuse potentially violent confrontations.

"The greatest thing you can do is just talk to somebody," said Shephard, a supervisor in the county's child sex crimes unit who was demonstrating the virtual training exercise. "It teaches you that time is on your side. You know that you can slow things down."

Last year, when Shephard, then a patrolman, talked down an armed and suicidal man, he was given a departmental award not for bravery, but for his de-escalation technique.

Amid national protests against police violence following George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis and debates over the role of law enforcement in U.S. communities, the de-escalation training for deputies in Volusia County offers a potential model for changing policing.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-sheriff-adopted-scottish-police-training-now-his-deputies-use-n1231886?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma